Internet marketing problems?

What are some of the most interesting or difficult challenges that business operations people are working on in Internet companies like Google, Dropbox, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Yahoo?

• After 5 years working in Fortune10 companies then 15 or so years being co-founder/owner of small consulting & tech businesses, I am pivoting and wondering how it's like to work in business operations role for an established internet company.  I have a background in operations research from top 3 IE/OR program in the US. My experiences were mostly on the operations side (no coding or development work, even though I wrote 10K+ lines of codes for my thesis). I have done sales, marketing, biz dev, product mgmt, project mgmt,  global supply chain ops, financial modelling, project financing (and hiring, firing, procuring IT hardware from eBay, doing late night janitorial works, and dozens other non-glamorous stuff that founders of bootstrapped companies do).  Having done all those, I am simply wondering what challenging biz ops problems are out there.

• Answer:

  The companies you mentioned (Google, Dropbox, Facebook, Yahoo) have very unique business challenges - and likely have hundreds of "business operations" roles. As an outsider, it's very difficult to identify the most interesting challenges for each company, and even if I worked within these organizations, my perspective on what is "interesting" would be different from other employees. The first question (of many) that you might ask yourself is: what challenges do you love to work on? Do you love creating efficient CRM systems for your Sales team? Do you love interacting with customers? Do you love figuring out how to scale a Customer Support team? If you join an established company, you will probably have to pick one of these challenges and find a role that forces you to become a specialist. If you join a startup, you will probably have to solve all of these challenges (hopefully not at the same time) over the course of a few years. Figure out what you're passionate about and pursue those opportunities. It's smart to solicit advice, but this is ultimately a personal decision.